About Me

Monday, January 9, 2017

While on my Unprocessed journey, I discovered that gluten inflames my psoriasis (skin condition) and so that makes me a soy/eggplant/pine nut/gluten free mostly vegan (always vegetarian). This means I have been eating a lot of the same dishes over and over again (Stir fried quinoa, butternut squash soup, and the paella (kinda) recipes have been on repeat for about a year. My goal for 2017 is to try new recipes though, the first of which is a recipe that my 5 year old and I put together recently. We call it corn stew.

1 cup of peanut butter (I use the just peanuts and salt ones, no sugar. You can "make" your own at Whole Foods or Safeway, or buy Trader Joe's or some other brands)

Mix all ingredients together until there is no flax seed mill powder lumps and it all looks like wet peanut butter. Use a tablespoon measuring aid to scoop out 1 tablespoon cookies (should make about a dozen) onto a cookie sheet (I use olive oil to make them not stick), and then flatten the cookies with a fork and bake on 300 for about 10 minutes (check them at 8, as these burn very easily so keep an eye on them). Let them cool for about 20 minutes and you should be able to scoop them off and eat them like a regular cookie without them falling apart.

I scooped it into muffins so that it would cook faster and be travel friendly, but this definitely tastes more like a bread than a muffin. They came out incredibly fluffy, not dense at all (at least fresh out of the oven).

Saturday, July 4, 2015

This is a recipe I have been making for years, but honestly I am not sure if I have posted on this blog before. I havent made it in at least a year, but thought this unprocessed challenge was the perfect time to resurrect it.

Saute 1 large potato and 3 green onions with olive oil for about 10 minutes.
Add in 1 box of veggie broth
Add 1 cup of red lentils (uncooked)
Add in herbs - I use basil, oregano, thyme, and rosemary from my garden - dont be shy with them.
Add in assorted veggies (I used zucchini, heirloom tomatoes, stewed tomatoes, kale, cauliflower, carrots, and bell peppers).
If you use a leafy green (collard greens, kale, spinach, etc.) add those in the last 5 min rotation.

There is a book by Megan Kimble, called Unprocessed. She deems that she can eat anything with ingredients that she could feasibly (even if time consuming) make herself at home. That means that she considers whole grains that are milled, cooked veggies, etc all to be unprocessed because with the right amount of time, she could make these items. Other items like white flour or processed sugar she could not make at home, she would need to make in a lab. (White flour strips out the nutrients and then adds them back in and even bleaches the flour by adding chlorine!). 100% Honey or agave nectar can be used in the place of sugar.

Only on Chapter 3 of the book, I am attempting the challenge. I am pulling out the handy juice maker, bread maker, steamer, and rice cooker (for quinoa and brown rice) and will be baking /making new dishes weekly that fit these requirements.

The hardest part is that you have to check the ingredients very closely. My go-to corn tortillas (Mission thin tortillas because thinner = less calories and carbs) have more than corn, water, and acid. Apparently they also have benzoic acid and amylase, both suspect ingredients not only for someone eating unprocessed, but for all people who don't like odd food additives. Benzoic acid is "harmless" in small quantities but poisonous if overexposed. Supposedly humans would need a lot of it to be poisoned, but even in lower doses it is known to cause rashes and asthma.

So off to the store I go to get whole food ingredients and start making recipes. This week I will be trying out a few bread recipes.